A site about the ephemerality of the socio-urban world

Category Archives: The Undercroft

So it’s done. 20,000+ petitions submitted from the Long Live Southbank campaign to Lambeth Council, apparently the largest number of objections ever raised to a single planning issue in the UK (see the ITV “news” segment on it here or the BBC one here). To be sure, there is no guarantee that it will work because as is painfully obvious in contemporary urban politics, the voice of the many is more often than not outweighed by the few writing the cheques. I have written on this blog previously that the undercroft skate spot that has been there since the 1970s is microcosmic of how urban subversions proliferate and reconfigure the urban spaces around them. And the current planning proposals of the South Bank Centre (including the proposed ‘urban arts park’) is again representative of how large-scale urban development programs subsequently appropriate subversive urban practices for economic and commercial gain. Continue reading →

I haven’t posted in a while, and I can blame that on a number of things – illness, marking, administration, family – but the bulk of most of my ‘free time’ has been devoted to writing (the fact that writing is now something done in our free time is I think, rather sad). The book is well on the way, and there’s a few papers forthcoming on the subject of cultural quarters and Tactical Urbanism. I’ve also been reading Bradley Garrett‘s book Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, which I had the pleasure to review for the Antipode Foundation.

Also, I have been aiding the Long Live SouthBank (LLSB) campaign which is calling for the preservation of the undercroft skate park in the face of demolition as part of the South Bank Centre’s Festival Wing plans. LLSB made a video ‘The Bigger Picture’ (embedded below) which puts the campaign in the wider context of the contemporary nature of urban development. I had the pleasure of being interviewed for the video, but more importantly, it gives a balanced and objective account what’s going on with these plans (and there is also a very revealing video on how the South Bank are committing ‘cultural vandalism’ here). If you feel compelled to sign the petition, then please do so now, the deadline is the 3rd January 2014 and we need as many signatures as possible by then.

On the 6th March this year, I tweeted about plans to redevelop the South Bank in London. The following day, the full extent of these plans were detailed. The new ‘Festival Wing‘ development includes “the under-used spaces from the undercrofts” being turned into retail outlets, and the creation of a “new riverside area for urban arts”. This translates as the reconfiguring of the iconic skateboarders ‘mecca’ (known simply as the ‘undercroft’) into a row of shops, as it is a key site of entry into the new Festival Wing. Moreover, the plan is to create a new site in which the skateboarders and graffiti artists can go, situated a few hundred metres further west, under the Hungerford Bridge (more details here).

For me, this exemplifies many of the problems associated with current urban redevelopment policies. Not only is it a case of a consumerism that is predicated upon a rarified notion of urban culture trumping a subcultural community, but the notion that the skaters (and associated activities) can be ‘rehoused’ in a designated area shows a complete lack of understanding of how such activities work, and what they can bring to a city’s cultural offerings. There are many (inter-connected) reasons why I am in such staunch opposition to this particular part of the development, but for the sake of clarity, I have delineated them into 3 key points…Continue reading →